UC Berkeley

In my dissertation, entitled "Hangukinron: The Shape of Korean National Ideology," I identify the key socio-historical factors in the formation of a particular, phenomenological form in modern Korean national ideology, outlining the character and mechanics of a specific type of ideological production that typifies the Korean national mode of thought, which peaked in South Korea between the years 1987-1997, from the time right before the 1988 Seoul Olympics and up to the near-collapse of the Korean economy in 1997. This period was the fullest flowering of an ideology called hangukinron: a popular discourse that posits a logical and obvious relationship between the purity of the Korean race/nation/culture (minjok) and that country's high level of economic success, vestiges of which remain quite viable and visible in the present day.